Watch Out For These Cryptocurrencies In 2019

2018 turned out to be very problematic for all those who invested in cryptocurrencies as most of the cryptocurrencies underwent losses between 80 to 95% from their all-time highs.

That was a harsh lesson for amateur investors looking for easy profits, forcing a high number of them to quit the market as they were not able to handle any further losses. However, what happened to the cryptocurrencies in 2018 is no different than what happens in financial markets: a rapid price appreciation, inflating a bubble, which when it bursts, affects all stakeholders.

Now 2019 has come along and some people have decided to stay out of it following the 2018 punch. However, if you’re up for it, here is a list of cryptocurrencies you should watch out for in the remaining half of 2019.

BINANCE COIN

Binance is one of the most popular crypto exchanges in the world. Apart from recording the highest traded volume, Binance has become a real driver for the development of blockchain and its global adoption.

Binance is well known for its various side-projects – Binance Labs – designed to fund and support new startups, Binance Academy – providing an in-depth knowledge of Blockchain technology, Binance Research – providing analysis and reports, and Binance Charity Foundation; all of the above are side-projects which will prove to add significant strategic advantages against competitors.

Watch closely because…

Binance was the first “centralized” exchange to switch its operation to a fully decentralized system, featuring high-performance trade execution made possible by a 1-second transaction confirmation time. The BNB token has played a central part in the success of the company. In fact, they recently unveiled a new platform as Margin Trading went live.

CHAINLINK

Among the projects most likely to solve the great divide between the ‘real’ and the ‘crypto’ world, lies Chainlink. Chainlink is a “smart-contract oracle” for decentralized applications. An Oracle is a data checker that cross-checks whether data entered into a Blockchain is correct or not. Think of it as a program that makes sure that only accurate data enters the blockchain. Blockchains alone can validate the data that is already “on-chain, ” which means the data that is already on the Blockchain. This is, in turn, a significant drag on the implementation of new features and developments linking Blockchains to real-world use cases.

Simply put, the idea of many smart contracts based Blockchain protocols is to ease out transactions and agreements between two companies and to do so anonymously. In reality, this often fails because companies operate in the “real world” and most agreements involve ‘real’ data such as money transfers, product production data, deliveries of physical goods, inflation data, and so on.

In contrast to ‘on-chain’ data, such ‘off-chain’ data is not secure and can be manipulated, thus undermining Blockchain’s central value proposition. To address this issue, Blockchains need some sort of third-party data feed to import external data and trigger smart contract executions. This is where the Oracle comes in.

Chainlink allows decentralized applications (DApps) to interact with “real-world” data and run transactions through third-party APIs. These API connections and the Chainlink Smart Contracts open up the possibility of developing hybrid systems of Blockchain-based technology actively interacting with events happening in the “real world”.

The project aims not only to connect Blockchains to the real world but it will also provide interoperability to the crypto world. Thus, it will link different blockchains to each other that otherwise wouldn’t be able to interact.

Reasons to look out for it…

The price of the token promised a huge performance in the early months of 2019, marking new all-time highs in BTC terms. That was something that is not easy to be found during a Bear Market. Furthermore, the company has a long history of establishing partnerships with solid API providers and hopefully, this trend will accelerate future prospects.

WAVES

The Waves team raised $16 mln in 2016 (long before the 2017 Great ICO-Hype) and successfully delivered a fully working a decentralized exchange in 2017. They have been here since before the average layman reconciled with the idea of cryptocurrency.

Other than a DEX with multiple crypto and FIAT gateways, Waves is a fast and scalable Blockchain which allows cheap transactions, permits a quick dispersal of personalized tokens in a matter of minutes, has an efficient staking system based on hundreds of Nodes and tens of Pools, has Multi-sig wallets, and recently introduced Smart Accounts and Smart Assets onto its Mainnet. You can pretty much say that they have their hands in everything a company like theirs should be focusing on.

Smart Assets are significant to the company and its shareholders as they feature scripts that will make asset freezing possible, allow whitelisting and blacklisting specific addresses to implement controls and restrictions, and allow taxation and controlling asset pairs so that tokens will be traded only against selected currencies. This might sound absurd because a lot of this goes against the core ethos of blockchain, but Waves’s positioning is aimed at Business use-cases that require full regulatory compliance. One can say that it’s the sacrifice of complete anonymity and freedom to deal with the risks of unregulated transactions.

Waves claims to be a comprehensive crypto-ecosystem backed by a structured and skilled company behind it. Everything in Waves is manageable through a Desktop App, Online Client, Mobile App, and a Chrome Extension. This showcases a focus on user experience design that is rare in the current cryptocurrency world.

It’s on fire because…

Waves grandly announced the launch of Tokenomica, a platform that aims to simplify the dispersal of Security Tokens. This will increase its relevance further, as players such as private companies, institutions and investments funds will finally have the tools to tokenize their assets. This will not only be a significant milestone for the Waves Roadmap but for the broad crypto ecosystem in general.

ENIGMA

When a high degree of privacy meets complex computations (Smart Contracts), you can be sure that one is talking about Enigma. The development team claims to be “building Enigma to be the privacy layer for the decentralized Web”. More than ever in times like these, this looks like something that is an urgent need. The first application of Enigma is the deployment of agreements between parties. It combines the secure nature of Smart Contracts and the privacy protection offered by the Enigma protocol.

Furthermore, Big Data companies analyze an enormous amount of information every second and most of that data is supposed to be protected. In fact, some businesses should add an extra layer of privacy to their dealings, namely companies dealing with pharmaceuticals and genomics, personal data, credit or more generally the Internet of Things.

When Enigma fully deploys their Secret Smart Contract, decentralized applications will be enabled to take care of sensitive data. This will significantly reduce the risk of exposing sensitive data to unauthorized parties. The full potential of this tool will be released in combination with Enigma’s Data Marketplace, which is already live and functional. This is where that data will be exchanged without risk of compromising its privacy.

Why go for it?

The development team clarified that the delay in the development was caused by the fact that the partners were not ready to act as active nodes. A choice was made to prioritize long-term growth over short-term risks. For sure this will be a game changer and will prove the real potential of the project. Additionally, the company relies a lot on stable and reliable partners (the most notable being Intel) and new partners are expected to be added in the coming months.

HOLOChain (HOLO)

Holochain is a computing system that enables developers to build an application without requiring any centralized organization. These applications can run across a peer-to-peer network, whose nodes will be a wide range of devices, including any modern smartphone.

Holochain is not based on Blockchain technology. It is rather aligned with traditional peer-to-peer networks such as Tor. Unlike Blockchains, Holochain is focused on finding a consensus on the infrastructure and DNA of any given application. It then allows the users to build this application based on that consensus. As such, Holochain is not data-centric as much as it is user-centric, taking an applications-first approach to the problem of widespread centralization of Internet-based applications at large.

Holochain defines itself as a “distributed” network more so than as a “decentralized” protocol for DApps such as Ethereum. That’s what puts it so much apart. While the difference may appear to be small, it is one of the main pillars of the project.

By distributing the computational power across many nodes and letting them act as independent users in the system, Holochain aims to solve the scalability problems that plague Blockchain-based protocols. Just like in old-school peer-to-peer networks, the more applications will be developed on Holochain, the more nodes will have an incentive to participate, and the more computational power will be added to the network. This will make it faster and more secure. Using it makes it get better over time, to summarise it.

Holochain doesn’t require consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake. It requires a de-facto Proof-of-Service approach in which those users that complete tasks for other users get rewarded in Holo Fuel. Around this new “money,” the project expects to build a whole new value-oriented ecosystem and community.

Here it comes, sweeping away everything…

One of the most important things being developed is the first HoloPorts, specific pre-configured devices that will offer storage and processing power needed by the applications running on the network and which will grant Holo Fuel rewards to their owners. Some of the first applications that will be run will be HoloVault, HoloChat, Fractal Wiki and Errand which will help to grow the already vast and very active Holo Community.